Whats your solution to the hard problem of consciousness?

[KoryKat]

I am on the subreddit Singularity, Consciousness , NonDuality... And I see this question coming up from time to time...

 

Now I vaguely remember Mark Solms satisfying this answer for me by reframing it, but I've forgotten the answer...

 

Maybe y'all can help me , does Leo have a definitive answer on this , or do y'all have a pretty good one?   

 

I found the answer here before : https://youtu.be/vaEhAS6P7AA?si=PE2Nsc15GMWBXShY having to rewatch it though 

 

 

[LastThursday]

No definitive answer. These are some off the cuff ideas:

It strikes me that the hard problem is just one of definining a thing (consciousness) in terms of itself. So can you retrieve anything from a recursive definition? If you try and use logic then it fails, it ends in a circular argument, or effect without cause. You can collapse the recursion and say something like "a brick is a brick", but that feels unsatisfactory even if you "know" what a "brick" refers to.

You could try and cheat and say that consciousness is the only thing that can be defined in terms of itself. Hence consciouness is exactly what you get if you have a pure recursive thing, i.e. the essence of consciousness is recursion itself; consciousness is conscious of itself. There's no room for another pure recursive thing because consciousness appropriates it all.

In maths and computer science recursive definitions are everywhere. But they are always finite in some way and operate within some sort of framework - numbers or algebra or bits and bytes. It's not clear if consciousness has a framework at all, that's what I mean by pure recursive. In the case of consciousness, it seems like consciousness is the recursion operating on itself.

It is clear that consciousness has stuff going on and structure and qualia to it. I'd call this "Content", what materialists would call matter and laws. Is it possible to have pure recursion without Content? In other words is it possible to be conscious of being conscious, in what might be called a complete void, where nothing happens? I'd call this a "Singularity".

If you go for Occam's razor then a Singularity would seem a simpler form of pure recursion than consciousness with Content and so more likely. But there is room for Content in pure recursion, if the Content is defined in terms of itself (i.e. it is cause and effect). This implies that Content is always relative to itself (recursive) and has no absolute ground or base. Recursion has built into it the idea of process and hence a component of separation with each iteration. This seems to tally with consciousness we experience, Content changes at a fixed rate. This appearance of rate of change seems to be a core part of what Content is.

To have a rate of change at all, there must be a "stickiness" to Content. To be conscious of change there is a form of comparison, where the previous iteration of Content is compared to the current Content. Enough must "stick" to be able to do the comparison at all. On the other hand for anything to change at all it must be "fluid" in some way. Fluid is just a different way of saying ungrounded or prone to forgetfulness. So Content itself is a recursive tug-of-war between stickiness and fluidity, or remembering and forgetting, living and dead, absolute and groundless, existence and non-existence.

Content also seems to be endless and abundant. A Singularity as its name implies would be a finite entity of one. The opposite of a Singularity would be complete fluidity in Content without any stickiness - i.e. everything would happen at once. But consciousness seems to be something in between.

I'd add that consciousness is both Content and recursion, and that they are the same thing.

[Carl-Richard]

Easy: choose analytical idealism and make transpersonal consciousness ("the ground of Being") the ontological primitive, which leaves the thing that seems to correlate with brain activity to be personal consciousness (private mind states; e.g. your thoughts vs. my thoughts). Now you don't have to solve how consciousness arises from brains, because consciousness has always existed.

However, it leaves you with a different problem; "the Decombination problem": how does transpersonal consciousness divide some parts of itself into separate individual perspectives (personal consciousnesses)? For that, you can point to a phenomena described in psychology as "dissociation", but how dissociation takes place is not very much understood, but at least there is a recognized concept in science that you can point to that can account for how transpersonal consciousness becomes personal.

Even though dissociation is not well-understood, by comparison, other competing ontologies (e.g. constitutive panpsychism and physicalism) do not have any better candidates for scientific concepts they can point to which can explain their respective main objections ("the Combination problem" and "the Hard problem"), like "emergence", which has different incompatible positions (strong vs. weak emergence) and are yet to provide any specific mechanisms of how the emergence takes place.

So from this, it might seem that the three ontologies presented are on roughly even ground, but analytical idealism also wins on the count of conceptual parsimony (Occam's Razor), in that it postulates only one ontological category (consciousness) while panpsychism and physicalism postulate (in a roundabout way) two ontological categories (physicality and consciousness) (I'm pretty sure panpsychism does that, but feel free to arrest me).

Edited December 19, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[UnbornTao]

grasp what it is directly

Edited December 19, 2023 by UnbornTao

[CARDOZZO]

The hard problem is humans not consciousness.

[Carl-Richard]

9 minutes ago, CARDOZZO said:

The hard problem is humans not consciousness.

Actually true on a philosophical level as well in an interesting way 😂  I think Anil Seth coined it "the Real problem of consciousness": how do we explain how human minds (personal consciousness) arise from brain states (roughly put). He also views the Hard problem as a red herring.

Edited December 19, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[Osaid]

Since when was science into koans?

[Applegarden8]

I will live for three things. Meditation, health and music. 

[Jannes]

What Carl Richard said. It's only a problem if you are a materialist. (when you believe in an objektive, physical world outside of yourself.) 

If you are an analytical idealist (you believe that the basic substance of the universe is consciousness) the hard problem of consciousness doesnt exist. 

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Jannes said:

(when you believe in an objektive, physical world outside of yourself.) 

To be clear, analytical idealism also posits an objective world outside of your personal self (personal consciousness), but this world is transpersonal Consciousness.

[Thought Art]

There is no hard problem of consciousness. That only exists in the materialist paradigm.

Reality is simply an infinite mind. Consciousness. 

Reality is consciousness imagining a human existence. 

Edited December 19, 2023 by Thought Art

[Thought Art]

@Carl-Richard I like your response

[Yimpa]

You can soften consciousness to be less rigid and more flexible.

[Parallax Mind]

Leo answers this question over and over again in his many videos. 

[Yimpa]

6 minutes ago, Parallax Mind said:

Leo answers this question over and over again in his many videos. 

And not just Leo’s videos. But every video on YouTube and beyond the computer tubes.

[Jannes]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

To be clear, analytical idealism also posits an objective world outside of your personal self (personal consciousness), but this world is transpersonal Consciousness.

Is it something that exists even when I am not aware of it?

[KoryKat]

So is there a simple answer such as Consciousness is an emergence of interiority of a complex self-sustaining system? 

 

Or can anyone define it in one sentence?

Edited December 19, 2023 by KoryKat

[Yimpa]

5 minutes ago, KoryKat said:

I actually get lost in all the options of videos, I have like 1000+ backlogged on my Watch Later list.  There's so many lol 😹 

Wow, I have 319 and assumed that that was a lot 

5 minutes ago, KoryKat said:

I'm looking for timestamps  (or a particular video) instead of just going through manually to find the exact wording and hammer it into my brain. 

Human mind needs an exact answer. Infinite Consciousness is Itself in every video, timestamp, speed, volume, brightness of your computer, etc. 

Also notice how the video you “decide” to watch now is imagined because of another thought you imagined. Kind of like connect the dots (higher intelligence) rather than whack a mole (needing to hit the like button all the “perfect” videos)

Edited December 19, 2023 by Yimpa

[KoryKat]

@Yimpa ENFP type 7 AUDHD lol, brainstorming and finding a million tabs to open up is a specialty

[KoryKat]

@Squeekytoy "has to keep itself busy"

 

The Ego sustains via distraction, but not Consciousness. Consciousness can be in the timeless boundless form of pure emptiness just drinking all the experience